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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/22358062">the way it should have been</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account'>orphan_account</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>IT (Movies - Muschietti)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Angst with a Happy Ending, Drama, F/M, Infidelity (Sort Of), M/M, Redemption for a character who gets approximately one minute of screentime</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>In-Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-01-22</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-01-26</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-18 00:22:29</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>4</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>11,340</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/22358062</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>All it took was a single moment shared between some upstart comedian with a three-day stubble and her husband. </p>
<p>Perhaps, Myra thought sadly, some people simply weren’t made for love.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Eddie Kaspbrak/Myra Kaspbrak (One-sided), Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>3</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>64</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. Prologue</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>The tags should make it pretty obvious, but even though this story has more of a focus on Myra than I imagine 99.9% of stories on this site do, it doesn't ship her with Eddie. It would be pretty difficult to do that and not make it sound at least mostly dysfunctional.</p>
<p>This story was a result of a fanfiction reading binge in which I took notice of the fact that Myra, if she's at all included, almost always only serves as an obstacle between Richie and Eddie. I'm not saying it's terrible or inhuman to use her as a plot device or a way to cause drama (I am going to be using her as both, after all), but I thought it might be interesting to give her a bit more characterization anyhow. </p>
<p>Rest assured, though, this is a Richie/Eddie centered fic. Myra will just be a little more than a screeching harpy who insults Eddie's maturity and ability to think for himself at every turn (I mean, not that she won't be that sometimes, but I'm trying to give her behavior some justification, okay)</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Myra knew many kinds of fear. She knew the fear of pain, of humiliation, of failure and regret. She thought she had probably spent all eight years of her life in more fear than a girl her age should ever have to be.</p>
<p>            The matter of the fact was, Myra loved her family. She loved them more than anything else, certainly more than she loved herself. Even when her father stumbled in drunk and incoherent and remained motionless for half-a-day, she still couldn’t help but adore him. Even when her mother threw one of her horrid fits, flinging pans and knives across the room and screaming bloody murder, Myra still worried herself to tears about not her own health, but that of her mother’s. And, when they weren’t black-out drunk or caught in an insensible rage, they were rather fantastic parents as well – affectionate yet firm, kind and warm. She understood her family wasn’t perfect, but it was enough. It had to be enough.</p>
<p>            Then, one day, her mother received a call, and after she had recovered from her intense bout of crying, she managed to inform Myra her father had been in a car accident. She drove them silently to the hospital, where they waited quietly for several hours for someone to come out from that eerie white hallway and tell them something, anything about his condition.</p>
<p>            It was in those hours that Myra learned a new fear – a fear of loss. It was worse than anything she had ever felt before. She had no idea what to do or think, and she was distraught at the knowledge that she could do nothing to help. Her mother, with her shaky breath and clenched fists, seemed not much better off. Even as they waited there in that deathly silent room, Myra could already sense that things couldn’t go back to the way they were. Their family had been irrevocably changed.</p>
<p>            When the surgeon came, her mother refused to look up, but Myra stubbornly stared straight into his eyes as he told them the news. They were filled with a mild sorrow, but he didn’t seem especially crushed as he informed them her father had not survived the surgery. Perhaps, Myra thought absently, he had become used to telling families news like that. Perhaps there was a way to live like that, constantly in the presence of death and grief. Myra couldn’t imagine it – her own heart was so utterly buried under an incomprehensible misery that she could barely perceive her own thoughts. Her mother collapsed onto the floor and wailed louder than Myra had ever heard before, and long after her eyes had dried out she continued to sob.</p>
<p>            She wasn’t exactly sure when it occurred to her. At the funeral, perhaps, or after, when she and her mother stood in the rain unprotected and stared numbly at the grave. She realized that, for all the terrible things that happened in the world, only a very small fraction had to happen. There was no grand reason her father had to die – if he had simply sought help for his alcoholism, he would have avoided the crash and come home to his family safe and happy. It was Myra’s fault, really. She hadn’t truly loved her father, or if she had, it was a pathetic kind of love that prevented her from ever trying to help him in any way that mattered. It hadn’t been enough to simply offer emotional support and curl up against him when he seemed down, and Myra must have truly been a foolish child to ever think so.</p>
<p>            Ultimately, humans were foolish creatures. That was why they formed relationships – to compensate for their weaknesses, to moderate their excesses and protect them from their own failings and flaws. Myra may have only been 8, but she was painfully aware of her own major flaw: more than anything, she needed love. To imagine a world where nobody cared about her was to imagine her own personal Hell. It had been too much to ask for from her father, to love her unconditionally when all Myra did was be there, look cute, and make inane suggestions (that always made her father laugh, but laughter didn’t save anyone, nor did it solve any problems). She wasn’t so stupid as to not learn from her mistake, however: she knew now that relationships were about give-and-take, about equivalent exchange and balance. She knew tragedies only happened when one side of the relationship failed to do their part. Thus, she would offer protection and concern, loyalty and affection, and dedicate her every thought and action to the people she loved, and in return, they would love her.</p>
<p>            It made perfect sense.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>            Nevertheless, Myra found little success in forming long-lasting relationships. The other person always drifted away despite Myra’s best efforts to keep them close, and, more than anything, the longer they spent with her, the more they seemed uncomfortable, anxious, or annoyed. Myra didn’t understand it – she was doing everything a good friend and partner ought to do. She was limiting their excesses, enforcing the decisions that maximized safety, and prioritizing others above herself. The time she could have spent on hobbies or leisure she instead spent worrying over their problems and convincing them of her perspective. Any person should have been grateful to have her.</p>
<p>            By the time she turned 30, she had largely given up on finding a romantic partner. Everyone always left in the end. She was tired, just so goddamned tired, of all the arguments and drama and conflict. Didn’t these idiots understand everything she did, she did for them? She had spent the rest of her childhood purging herself of any remnant selfishness within herself, and she came out a loving, benevolent woman, the kind TV shows and movies always touted as heroes. But heroes always got their romantic interest and their happily ever after, and Myra was pretty sure she would never get her own.</p>
<p>            A small part of her insidiously whispered she was going about it all wrong, that she might have had the right concept, but her execution was so horrendously off no amount of good intentions could compensate for it. As Myra became more and more resigned to her eternal loneliness, she found herself increasingly willing to listen to this part of her. Even if it was wrong, even if it was utterly selfish – well, what was the point of trying to be selfless anyway? She had placed her heart in the palms of too many, desperately hoping the next person wouldn’t crush it, would cherish it the way it should be, and every time they had thrown it away like yesterday’s news. If they weren’t going to so much as acknowledge Myra’s efforts, she figured she may as well stop.</p>
<p>            Then, two years later, she met Eddie Kaspbrak, and everything changed.</p>
<p>            Eddie was different, to say the least. He put up with Myra’s concern, did his best to alleviate her infinite worries, and put up with her acerbic rants. Perhaps he didn’t seem especially affectionate towards her, and perhaps he often cut their dates short for some vague work-related reason, but Myra had gone so long without someone who voluntarily spent time with her that she thought that this, after all, might be what love was. The movies always portrayed it so unrealistically, like two people could love each other with all their hearts and annoy each other only very occasionally (and only ever for the right reasons). Like two people could adore every part of their partner, even their most obvious flaws. It was nonsensical – Myra loved Eddie, of course she did, but she didn’t love him by ignoring – no, encouraging – his sometimes reckless behavior or incomprehensible need for independence. That wasn’t what love was about. If Myra saw something wrong with Eddie, she did her uttermost to fix it or otherwise mitigate its effects. She dedicated herself to improving him and moderating him when he couldn’t apparently find the capacity to. Now that was true, real love.</p>
<p>            And when, two years into their relationship, Eddie took her to a fancy restaurant, got down on one knee, and asked for her hand in marriage, Myra knew, without a shadow of a doubt, she had gotten things right. The other partners, the ones who had accused her of being too smothering or of coddling them so tightly they felt they could barely breathe, simply hadn’t been right for her. Eddie was right for her.</p>
<p>            Myra had had her doubts about Eddie, of course. She wasn’t so delusional as to not recognize the signs of a waning affection – the distant looks, the inexplicable anger, the constant, badly-constructed excuses. But all those were cleared away when he proposed to her. Myra had never seen herself as well-versed in the art of romance, but even she knew a man didn’t propose to a woman they didn’t love. Thus, Eddie must have loved her. He just had a slightly unconventional way of showing it.</p>
<p>            So Myra continued doing what she had been doing for so long. She criticized the parts of him that needed criticizing, moderated the behaviors of his that needed moderating, and kept an even closer eye on him because it was clearly working. Finally, someone had recognized and appreciated her efforts, and it had culminated in a perfectly functional marriage. For the first time in two decades, Myra saw the path in front of her as clear as day, a wonderful future to spend with Eddie in domestic bliss until the end of their days. And, of course, they had arguments and fights like every couple, but no matter how heated it got, no matter what mean-spirited blows they exchanged, Eddie always came crawling back to her. But not like a drug, no, of course not. Their relationship was so much more than that – they were, just perhaps, soulmates.</p>
<p>            It was funny, really. After their wedding, Myra had clung to Eddie particularly insistently. She used every trick in her self-assembled mental handbook to make sure they spent time together every day, because, like any sensible person knew, the more time people spent together, the closer they became, and Myra wanted to be closer to Eddie than anyone else. She figured that his clear discomfort and unspoken anxiety were because he had never experienced love before as Myra loved him. He simply didn’t know how to react, the poor man.</p>
<p>            It was okay, though. Myra would fix that as well. She knew Eddie loved her, which meant he would change for her as well. Myra had always believed in the fruits of labor and hard work, and so she knew that, if she worked at this relationship enough (at Eddie enough), it would all be worth it in the end. Myra hadn’t spent so long searching for her soulmate to allow him to slip out from her grasp.</p>
<p>            It was funny, really. All it took was one trip to some unknown town in the metaphorical backwoods of Maine to break down every carefully-constructed belief Myra had ever had about herself and her marriage. All it took was a single moment shared between some upstart comedian with a three-day stubble and her husband.</p>
<p>            Perhaps, Myra thought sadly, some people simply weren’t made for love.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Derry's the Place to Go</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Myra flies to Derry and has some very unwelcome revelations.</p>
          </blockquote><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>I'd predict about one more Myra-centric chapter, and then, after that, she'll probably become more of a side character. Never thought you'd hear "Myra-centric" in the IT fandom, now did you?</p><p>Also: I know my chapter 1 end note... mentions some things that do not happen in chapter 2, but it was honestly just getting so long that I figured it would be best to split it up into two chapters. Worry not, the arguments and kisses are coming!</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>            There were several things Myra loved about Eddie: his generally amicable demeanor, his understanding of the infinite threats of the world, and, first and foremost, his complete and utter lack of spontaneity.</p><p>            Myra loathed spontaneity with all her soul. Spontaneity was stupid, irrational, and it led to the sort of life-risking behavior Myra had worked most of her life suppressing in either herself or others. With Eddie, it was easier. It wasn’t that he didn’t, at times, make foolish, reckless decisions, but never anything wholly outside the range of reason. More than that, he was always very willing to listen to Myra. She thought she had never had such a loving, understanding partner before in the 4 decades she had thus lived.</p><p>            Then, out of the blue, after a bad call that left Myra fretful and anxious, Eddie disappeared. Sometimes, after a bad argument, he would childishly ignore Myra’s texts and calls for a few hours, but he always, always came back with an apology. Not this time. This time, he didn’t only crash his car, he also suddenly became quite insistent on taking a few days off work to go to some backwater town in the middle of nowhere (well, Maine, technically, but that might as well have been nowhere to Myra). He called her briefly an hour after their last call to inform her of his incomprehensible decision, then terminated it before Myra could get so much as a word in.</p><p>            In all their years of dating and later marriage, Myra had never seen Eddie so illogical, so rash and unwilling to even hear her out. It wasn’t anything like the irritation he commonly expressed at Myra’s worries, which understandably grated at her nerves but which she put up with because she loved him with all her being. It was more like he simply couldn’t bother to listen – like he had magically found some new purpose in life and no longer needed Myra.</p><p>            Myra was insensible with rage. How much of her life had she spent on this man? How many grey hairs had she acquired worrying over his health and his safety? How much love did she have to show before he began to reciprocate in full? Myra was many things, but a pushover she most certainly was not. After a prolonged search for Derry on the web (it was surreal to think Eddie, who had become probably the most essential part of her life, had come from such a tiny town, with barely a whisper of an address on some obscure website about child kidnappings) and one final attempt to contact Eddie which, not too surprisingly at this point, ended in voicemail, she bought a ticket and boarded the next plane to Maine. Myra was his wife, after all, and it was her duty to find him no matter where he went and talk some sense into that sometimes-retarded head of his. But even as she sat listlessly on the plane, she wondered if Eddie would even appreciate all the trouble she was going through to reach him. She wondered if he had ever appreciated all the trouble she had gone through to maximize his safety, and, therefore, his happiness (because anyone who was safe ought to also be happy, it was only logical).</p><p>            Faintly, that treacherous part of her mind, one that had been with her for as long as she could remember but that she had thought she’d learned to tune out, began whispering its constant stream of criticisms and doubts, and Myra inexplicably couldn’t ignore it this time. It hissed that Myra must have been the most delusional woman on the planet to think her marriage was anything but a sham. It whispered that she wasn’t an idiot, and she should stop acting like one and finally face the reality – the reality that Eddie didn’t love her at all, that he’d only ever used her as some twisted security blanket, and that every romantic moment they’d ever shared had been entirely in her mind.</p><p>            The one undeniable truth of the whole situation was, Eddie had abandoned her. After so many years together, he must have understood just how much he meant to Myra, how much of an investment she had made in him. And yet, he had left her seemingly without a trace of hesitation, like it was something he’d always wanted to do but never had the guts to before now. That wasn’t something a man did to the woman they loved.</p><p>            It didn’t make any sense. Myra had worried herself into literal fainting spells over her husband, and he didn’t so much as try to explain the situation to her in return. He had tossed her away like trash, and the worst part of it all was the ease with which he had done it. That wasn’t something a husband did to their wife.</p><p>            Sometimes, when they found time to have a nice dinner out, Myra liked to think they were a young couple, deeply infatuated with each other to the point of obsession. She was beginning to realize in shortening intervals how much of that image she must have fabricated out of some desperate need to be loved. But she knew now – Eddie hadn’t placed his hand over hers out of affection or love, but pure and simple obligation. He had leaned over and kissed her on cheek and lips to convey a sense of romance without truly feeling it. Myra burned with humiliation, confusion, but it was dampened by an unfathomable sadness that lingered heavy and dark in her. She had gotten it all wrong. She had gotten it all wrong once again.</p><p>            But she still couldn’t turn back. She needed to know now, needed to confirm what was lying in her mind like a rusty blade. And, despite all of her epiphanies, she still worried about Eddie nonetheless. Even if Eddie yelled directly into her face to never show up again, to leave and never return, she still needed to, at the very least, confirm he was safe. Eddie, after all, was a man riddled with flaws and insecurities, and Myra should have realized sooner she alone wasn’t sufficient to cover all of them (oh, she <em>knew</em> she should have forced him into therapy). It simply wasn’t safe to leave him alone for too long lest he get some idiotic idea in his head and end up hurt. Myra was going to march down there, ensure his safety, and then spend a good four hours yelling her head off at him. It was a good plan.</p><p>            That all fell apart when she arrived in Derry and, by coincidence, caught sight of the local newspaper on an old blue stand. Almost half of the page was filled with a black-and-white photo of an old, decrepit house referred to as the Well House on Neibolt Street in the caption, and the headlines above declared, “Neibolt House collapses inexplicably! Neighbors left shocked by destructive display!” Sheer terror gripped her, held her still on that empty street as her eyes filled involuntarily with tears. It couldn’t possibly be a coincidence that Eddie left for this small town just a day ago and now a house had collapsed. At the same time, Myra couldn’t believe her husband might have had something to do with all of this. It clashed fiercely with the image of him she had been constructing for nearly a decade now, but Myra had grown wary and untrusting of her own judgements – if she had so terribly misjudged her own marriage, how was she to know if she had even gauged her husband correctly? Perhaps he was actually a criminal, or a thrill-seeker, or something like that. Perhaps he wasn’t at all the boring but kind man Myra had taken him for.</p><p>            On a whim, she asked directions from a passerby, and half-jogged her way over to Neibolt Street. Myra wasn’t very keen on exercise or physical labor in general, but the trip, even on foot, turned out to only be ten minutes. Myra, who had been born in a big city and never left, supposed that was commonplace in a town like Derry.</p><p>            It was blaringly obvious which house (or lack thereof) the newspaper had been referring to – there was a lot filled with empty space where a house should have been, and an inexplicable rectangular hole at its base was filled with rubble and rotted grey wood. As Myra approached, her heart pounding wildly, she noticed a man standing in front of the collapsed house.</p><p>            At the sound of her footsteps, the man turned to face her. He had a messy stubble and even messier hair, and he regarded her with vague disinterest and apathy. He looked, Myra thought, like a man who had just witnessed the end of the world and was waiting for it to reach him already.</p><p>            A thought rose to the forefront of her mind, and she was grateful for a lead to pursue, however tenuous or weak. “Are you the owner of this house?” she asked politely.</p><p>            “Me?” The man barked mirthlessly. His mouth seemed set in a permanent scowl. “You must be new to town, lady. Nobody’s lived in this godforsaken house for a long, long time.”</p><p>            Myra, who felt slightly offended at being referred to as “lady,” shortly replied, “then what are you doing here?”</p><p>            The man grew somehow even more morose as he turned to refocus on the ruins of the house. “Just… remembering an old friend, I guess.” His gaze grew uncomfortably distant, and Myra received the distinct impression things were happening in his head she had neither the capacity nor desire to know. She squinted at him – the longer she examined him, the more he seemed familiar. Had she met him before, perhaps? Had he been a patient? Or maybe there had been something in that newspaper mentioning a man of his description-</p><p>            Something clicked in her head. No, she had never met him before, but she had, she supposed, seen him in passing. He was the infamous Richie Tozier, the unfortunate cause of Eddie’s raucous laughter many a late weekend night (it was the only time she let him stay up late – sleep deprivation indirectly killed more than car crashes and drug overdoses combined). Myra had never tried to watch the show with him, if only because the look on his face when he looked at the screen was very uncomfortable to behold (and it was only now she realized that was because it was an expression he never wore with her – an expression of pure joy that Myra had dismissed as humor because the alternative was unthinkable at the time), but Richie had a unique face. Also, Myra wasn’t one to hang around those who arranged their hair like a hobo, so those she had seen left quite a mark.</p><p>            “You’re Richie,” she proclaimed, and the sinking feeling in her gut intensified. What was this big-shot comedian doing out here in the middle of nowhere, in the exact same place as her husband? “Richie Tozier, the comedian. My husband loves your show.”</p><p>            Richie turned sharply back to her with an audible gasp, and his eyes widened with realization. “Your husband? You- are you- I mean, are you Myra? Myra Kaspbrak?”</p><p>            Myra turned away and wrapped her arms around her body. It was a warm summer afternoon, the sun just barely sinking below the horizon, but she felt unaccountably cold. “That’s me.” Glancing back at Richie’s wide-eyed stare, she was filled with a sudden icy terror. “You know my husband, don’t you?”</p><p>            “Kind of,” Richie admitted. “We were childhood friends. We both grew up here, but after high school we drifted apart.”</p><p>            “But you don’t live here anymore,” Myra said without a trace of inquiry in her voice. She felt a little like a detective, but with none of the triumph or satisfaction of solving the case and all the anxiety. “You must have come back for some reason.”</p><p>            “Look, Myra-“ Richie began, then abruptly halted mid-sentence. His eyes glimmered with an unspeakable sorrow, but he turned away before Myra could see anything more. When he next spoke, his voice was choked with raw emotion, as if his throat had been burned by the intensity of it all.</p><p>            “I’m so sorry,” he said eventually. “I’m so fucking sorry.”</p><p>            If Myra had thus far been dipping in her feet in the bottomless pool of grief, Richie’s sudden apology sent her spiraling down into the inky darkness. She knew what Richie spoke of, because he couldn’t be speaking of anything else. Despite that, she still forced herself to ask the question, because it was the one and only hope she had left. Perhaps she had misinterpreted something, or perhaps they weren’t talking about the same thing. Perhaps Eddie was still alive, and Myra could find a way to salvage and reconstruct the ground beneath her before she plummeted for eternity into the metaphorical abyss.</p><p>            “S-sorry for what?” Myra asked, even as her own eyes filled with tears. “What the hell are you talking about? You cou-couldn’t possibly be telling me right now that-“</p><p>            “He’s dead, Myra,” Richie sobbed out miserably. “He’s dead. I’m so sorry.”        </p><p>            Myra’s legs, which were already quite tired from the journey over here, buckled involuntarily, and she collapsed to the ground before she could even perceive she was doing anything of the sort. Richie instinctively ran over, knelt down, and supported her with both hands as she cried insensibly on the sidewalk.</p><p>            “No, no, no, no, no,” she said, over and over again, like a mantra. She had no idea what else to say. She thought back to how Richie had seemed, as if the world had ended for him, and she felt quite sure that her own expression must have matched his now. It certainly felt like it should have.</p><p>            She was forcibly taken back to that eerily quiet waiting room in the hospital, sitting with her head tucked into her elbows and praying for a miracle. She’d been so foolish then, and she hadn’t apparently stopped even 3 decades after the fact, because no matter how much she had changed about herself, and no matter how much of an effort she made to change those around her, she had still failed once again. Her father was dead, and now so too was her husband.</p><p>            She wasn’t sure how long they spent on that sidewalk, pressed against each other in some impromptu hug that grew increasingly uncomfortable the more conscious Myra became of it. Eventually, Richie got the message, and he leaned back uneasily as Myra forced herself to her feet and rubbed angrily at her face.</p><p>            She felt calmer now, but it was a calm entirely separate from tranquility or peace. She felt like she imagined those in near-death experiences felt – like, even in the face of doom, there was no point in struggling. Myra didn’t want to struggle anymore.</p><p>            Richie fidgeted erratically with his hands as Myra took a minute to regain her composure. He kept glancing at her, then back at the house, then at nowhere in particular, and then back at her. Myra might have found it somewhat endearing if not for the fact she had been told not half an hour ago that her husband was dead.</p><p>            The tension hung between them like a live wire, waiting to be snapped. Myra’s head was positively swarming with questions, but for every question there was also an accusation. Surely, surely, if Richie had been here for the same purpose as Eddie, if he knew already that he was dead, then he must have somehow played a part in his death. Myra still felt numb with grief and sorrow, but she could already feel a tiny part of her flickering with the beginnings of anger. She had no idea what happened, but she knew Richie must have been involved.</p><p>            Richie, for his part, just looked extremely uncomfortable, but the discomfort clear on his face clashed with a misery so deep that Myra almost felt sympathetic for his plight. She didn’t know why he seemed so downcast from the death of an old friend, one he himself had said he’d drifted apart from in their adult years, but the distress in his form and expression were undeniable.</p><p>            They stood in the darkening street, perhaps a foot from each other, neither willing to make the first move or say the first word. Myra thought, somewhat cowardly, that it might be best if she just walked away and returned when Richie, the irritating little bastard, wasn’t there.</p><p>            Then, to her right, the rubble of the house shifted ever so slightly. A tile slid down a fragment of polished wood and clinked against a jagged collection of plaster and dust. A splinter of wood snapped off a plank and flung near-invisibly into the air. A low, chilling groan emitted from near the surface of the rubble, and even in the dim light Myra could swear she saw something like a finger poking out of a hole in the rubble.</p><p>            Richie was the first to move. He sprinted desperately towards the house, and even though there was no real reason to believe it was the person they both fervently wished it was, he still screamed “Eddie!” into the air as he trampled over ceramic tiles, bent metal plates, and large swathes of wooden planks in search of the source of the sound.</p><p>            It took Myra a second to even process what was happening – her immediate instinct was to run away, as she imagined was natural and justifiable to feel when some unknown entity began moaning and displaying signs of a life they definitely shouldn’t have anymore, but as she looked at Richie digging through the rubble, she felt herself compelled to follow.</p><p>            If she retreated now, though she wasn’t sure why she felt so, she knew she would have lost in some profound and terrible way to this eccentric comedian. And so, with one deep inhalation, she rushed after Richie and hoped with all that she was that the finger she’d glimpsed had belonged to her dear husband and not some stranger.</p><p>            It was the least, Myra reasoned, the world could do for her. If they couldn’t even give her a partner who loved her as much as she did him, the very least they could do was allow the husband she did have to survive whatever horrific incident he had been in.</p><p>            “I’m coming, Eddie-bear!” she yelled as she sunk to her knees in the midst of the ruins and joined Richie in shoving away rubble. “Hold on!”</p><p>            For a brief instant, she wondered where she had even gotten the nickname “Eddie-bear” from. She certainly hadn’t affixed “bear” to any of her other partners’ names. Perhaps Eddie had, at one point, asked her to do so. Or perhaps she had heard someone refer to him as “Eddie-bear” and thought it appropriate to call him such as well.</p><p>            But even as her and Richie’s combined efforts quickly revealed a hand, then an arm, then shockingly familiar black hair covered in dust and stained with blood, the sinking feeling remained in her stomach, because she knew, with barely a vestige of a doubt to grace her mind, that it would never be appropriate to call him “Eddie-bear” again.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Well, I don't think it was really a mystery that the man underneath the rubble is Eddie, but I'm trying to do something unique regarding his resurrection. Remember Hockstetter in IT Chapter 2? I'm figuring Eddie will be something like that, but much, much less freaky and misshapen (and he'll have most of his skin and his capacity to speak and think intact). I just thought it was interesting that Pennywise does seem to have some power that enables him to resurrect corpses, and yet I haven't seen any fics yet that have explored how this might apply to Eddie. Not that I know why Pennywise would resurrect Eddie, but hey, people (or crazy psychotic and supernatural clowns, in this case) do crazy things when they're about to die. Maybe he had a change of heart at the very last second. And yes, Hockstetter might have just been a proxy for Pennywise, but it's never exactly established whether this is the case or not, so we'll just go with the somewhat tenuous idea that Pennywise can resurrect people. In any case, I chose this form of resurrection specifically because I feel it'll add more weight to both his death and his revival, and it also gives me a lot of content and angst for future chapters so... look forward to that?</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. A Dark Spot</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Eddie wakes up in a familiar place.</p>
          </blockquote><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>This chapter is, essentially, my attempt to bridge a lot of gaps between Eddie being revived and somehow ending up buried in the rubble of the Well House. A lot of it was improvised, which is probably kind of obvious by how strange it gets by the end, but IT is a weird movie anyway. In any case, the first half of it establishes some things that'll become major conflicts down the road, but the second half is more action-based (because no matter how hard I try, I will always somehow contrive a way to write action into my stories). Rest assured this will be one of the only chapters with any real "action" (in the physical, derring-do sense) in it, because that is not at all what this fic is supposed to be about.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>            For almost his entire adult life, Eddie had lived in constant fear of the unknown, of pain and sickness and possibly everything that might one day harm him. He’d allowed himself to be drawn back into old habits, had gone so far as to commit himself to them once more and marry Myra, because he had forgotten what it was like to be happy. Away from his friends (away from Richie), his life had diminished in some essential way, and all that remained were the anxieties and worries his mother had established in him at a very young age. At the time, it had made perfect sense to propose to Myra. It didn’t matter that he felt like a cord was tightening against his neck almost every time they spent time together – at the very least, he wasn’t alone in his fears. He had someone to share them with, someone who probably thought about them even more than Eddie did, someone who cared about him seemingly unconditionally and who would do anything to ensure his safety. Compared to that guarantee, his happiness was nothing.</p><p>            Then, Mike had called him, and like a moth drawn to a flame, Eddie had practically quit his job (he hadn’t exerted himself trying to contact his boss and explain, as caught up as he’d been trying to remember why there was some blank space in his memory he dreaded to fill) to go to Derry. As a small, dilapidated sign welcomed him to his childhood home, tiny streams of sensation and memory trickled into his brain. At first, he had dismissed it as the natural sensation any person would feel at re-visiting the place they grew up. Now, he wondered if it hadn’t been something more, because, at the very least, there was no way he would have forgotten Richie otherwise. They’d promised they would stay in touch after high school, and then they’d both moved from Derry and that promise had evaporated like a puddle of water on a hot, dry day.</p><p>            Over the course of 40 years, Eddie had accumulated no small amount of regrets. None, he thought, could compare to the dejection he felt when he considered how easily he had let Richie go.</p><p>            22 years later, they finally reunited, and Eddie began to forget why exactly he had spent so much of his life in fear. Really, he began to forget why he had married Myra. Here was a man worth fighting for, worth confronting nightmares and monsters for, worth risking his life for. Besides that, it seemed ludicrous to worry about dirty water or airborne infections (he’d barely managed to convince Myra he didn’t need to wear a mask in public) when he’d just seen horrific abominations pop out of fortune cookies. Even as he followed Richie to the inn and began packing his things for the trip back, he found himself strangely reluctant to run away. He knew this wasn’t something one (even Eddie, who was very, very good at running away) could run away from. His fears were confirmed by Beverly’s confession, but part of him was inexplicably relieved to have a good reason to stay. Even though he stoutly refused to admit it, he knew why – it meant he didn’t have to forget Richie yet. It meant he could spend some time with him, even if it was just cowering from Pennywise and his veritable circus of horrors. It meant he could finally feel happy for the first time in decades, even though he knew it was an impermanent, fleeting sensation (because Richie had his own life, and he didn’t think an old childhood friendship was enough of a reason to throw a successful career down the drain).</p><p>            So, as he had laid there on the cold stone ground, looking up at Richie’s frightened eyes, he hadn’t felt scared. It was hilarious, honestly – how much time had he spent scared of the tiniest things because of the miniscule chance they might hurt him? How much misery had he endured in the name of personal safety? And yet here he was, bleeding out in some underground cavern, and he didn’t even care that much. He was, at that point, about 90% certain he was going to die, and all he could think about was Richie. He found himself fearing death not for death’s sake, but because he knew it meant he’d never get a chance for closure. It also meant Richie, who seemed genuinely terrified and not, for once, of Pennywise, would never get closure either. There wasn’t enough time anymore – Eddie had squandered it all being a shameless coward while the person he loved lived his own life on the other side of the country.</p><p>            When Richie reluctantly left his side to join their friends in their sudden insulting spree, Eddie did his best to hold on. At the very least, he wanted the last thing he said to Richie to not be “I’ll be fine, now go kill that fucking clown.”</p><p>            And, well, he didn’t want to be alone when he died.</p><p>            But the darkness overtook him too quickly, too forcefully, for someone like Eddie to fight against it. His grip on Richie’s coat loosened, and he silently mourned all that might have been as he passed from the world of the living.</p><p>            Two hours later, he woke up.</p><p>            His awakening was slow and lethargic, and his body seemed almost reluctant to follow his instinctual command to stand up and look around. Damp stone pressed against his back, and after several seconds of mental flailing, he finally managed to pull himself up. His shirt felt slightly strange from the hole in it, but he didn’t dare look down and see if there was a matching one in his chest – he didn’t want to know.</p><p>            He might have taken a second to gather his bearings if not for the fact that he was surrounded by complete darkness, and only the feeling of jagged stone against his shoes let him know that he was, most likely, still trapped in that damned cave where their final confrontation against Pennywise had begun (and ended, he hoped). As the drowsy mist of slumber dissipated from his brain, it was replaced by an all-consuming panic. He had no idea what to do, where to go, or even what was happening with his own body. His right hand rose and tentatively skirted the edges of where he knew the hole had been (and might still be), but there was no flow of blood. In fact, now that he thought about it, his midsection was entirely numb. At the very least, he should have felt the stagnant air brush against his exposed skin, or the stabbing pain that typically accompanied large, grievous wounds. Instead, he felt absolutely nothing.</p><p>            Even then, he refused to probe his torso in search of the hole. Either way, the fact he was alive and able to stand after the damage dealt to him was almost too terrifying to consider. Somehow, he knew he hadn’t been revived through conventional means – everything, from the lack of sensation to the unnatural gnawing sensation in his stomach, screamed Pennywise to him.</p><p>            Also, as far as he knew, he was entirely alone. He wondered if his friends had made it out, or if they had simply perished in a different place. He quickly and forcibly refocused his mind on his present situation before the bile in his throat grew too tumultuous to hold in.</p><p>            After spending a minute valiantly trying to suppress a panic attack, Eddie finally yelled a hesitant greeting into the air and did his best to hold his violently shivering body still as he waited for a response. He wasn’t sure whether to feel dismayed or not when another minute passed and none came.</p><p>            He cautiously placed one foot forward, then another. His basic plan was to find a wall and follow it to an exit. Failing that, his backup plan was to scream at the top of his lungs and hope someone heard. Failing that, his 2<sup>nd</sup> backup plan was to curl up in a ball and cry until he passed out. That, at the very least, he knew couldn’t fail.</p><p>            His foot caught on a slight depression, and he yelped as he tumbled onto the floor. His eyes closed instinctively in anticipation of the pain that would surely follow, but even as he distantly heard a thud that must have been the impact, he felt no pain lancing up his body or lingering in his shoulder, which he had twisted to take the brunt of the impact. He shot back up and tried to reason his way back to calm while his lungs began to hyperventilate of their own accord.</p><p>            It was fine, it was absolutely fine. After all, he could still feel the pressure of the rugged stone ground on his feet, couldn’t he? He could still sense the humid, still air about him, and his hearing seemed perfectly functional, and – he ran a finger through his hair and sighed in relief at the slight tingling sensation – maybe he couldn’t feel pain, but it wasn’t as if he had entirely lost his ability to feel. And perhaps everything felt a bit dumbed down, like his body was transmitting the bare minimum amount of sensation and nothing more, but hey, maybe that meant it wouldn’t feel so bad when he died of dehydration down here.</p><p>            A sob forced its way out of Eddie’s mouth before he could stop it, but he managed to tamp down on the rising tide of panic before anything else got through. His situation was a bit strange, certainly, but he hadn’t lost the will to live. He still had so many things to do, so much life left to live, and he was sure his friends were miserable without him (they better be, he thought lightly, after all the crap I went through for them), and there was Richie as well, Richie who he needed to tell something, who Eddie felt warm just thinking about, who he really, really hoped-</p><p>            The ceiling, which he quickly realized wasn’t really a ceiling, shifted noisily. His breathing, which had finally stabilized, froze with him as something like a strangled snarl emitted from behind him. In his haste to back away from the sound, his foot knocked against an object with a click. He instinctively leaned over to pick it up, and though he still couldn’t see an inch in front of him, he knew it was a flashlight. He flipped the switch with a twitch of his thumb and pointed it in the source of the snarl as he continued to back away.</p><p>            The light caught on a slight figure, crouched down on all fours like a dog, that once might have been human but which was much more like a monster from Eddie’s worst nightmares now. His skin was white and flakey, and large portions of it were midway through peeling off like chipped paint. His hair hung in messy clusters from an otherwise bald scalp, but, unluckily enough, they did nothing to obscure his pale eyes and open mouth. He let out another growl but stayed terrifyingly still as Eddie retreated.</p><p>            “Holy shit, holy shit, holy shit,” he repeated absently. “What the actual fuck is that.” His back bumped against something solid. He looked around to confirm, with a stomach that felt like it could not sink any lower, that he had indeed hit the wall.</p><p>            The monster tilted its head and observed Eddie with an almost curious look in its eyes. Its limbs tensed against the floor. Eddie scooted along the wall and desperately hoped his slow movements weren’t enough to provoke it.</p><p>            No such luck. The monster screeched maliciously as it launched itself into Eddie, who barely managed to duck underneath in time. The room shook with the impact, but Eddie didn’t stop to see if the monster’s foolhardy first move incapacitated it – his flashlight had finally caught on an exit, and he sprinted for it wildly.</p><p>             The putrid smell of sewer water (greywater, he thought with an involuntary shiver) met him and nearly caused him to finally empty out the contents of his stomach at the exit. He risked a glance back, where the monster was gingerly touching its head with one hand while the other pivoted his body to face Eddie.</p><p>            Having finally realized where he was, he turned back just as the monster let out another anguished wail and darted for him. The passageway from the cavern narrowed into an intersection with the sewer, and as he sprinted for it, he racked his brain and memory for the way out. He had only ever had to get out once, and he’d been 13 then. The only thing he knew was that, at one point, there was a left turn, and that led to the narrow hole of the well which served as the only reliable exit point from this hellhole.</p><p>            At a whim (though hopefully influenced by unconscious memories), he turned right. The hot, humid air, no doubt saturated by unaccountable amounts of feces and urine, brushed past him like the fetid breath of Pennywise’s favorite leper (and honestly, he didn’t understand why Pennywise had such a predisposition for leprosy. Why not- why not anything else?) He ran through the tunnels, turning at random in the hopes his mind was somehow guiding him to the exit. Somewhere behind him, the monster was still snarling, but he didn’t dare risk looking behind.</p><p>            Then, finally, after what felt like a decade of running (or briskly walking through smaller tunnels), he caught sight of an opening to his left which he somehow knew led to the well on Neibolt Street. He lunged for it, then squirmed his way through the slender passage until he reached the exit. In any other situation, he would have indulged in a few minutes of panic and worry about the prospects of propelling out of a relatively tiny opening and climbing his way out of the well, but he was painfully aware of the enormous cost a few moments of hesitation might have in this particular case. He inched his way out of the tunnel, his body trembling with the exertion of not folding, until his hand finally made contact with a rugged stone wall. The monster let out a tremendous roar and stuck his head, then his arms, into the tunnel.</p><p>            Eddie scrambled his way back up the well. His ascent was somewhat helped by the fact that the scrape of stone against his fingers felt like nothing but a mere whisper of what it should have been. Perhaps it might have damaged his hands, but at the moment, it helped him to climb up the well and roll over and out of it before the monster had even begun climbing. He rolled to his side with a groan, then paused as a shard of wood shifted beneath him. He hurriedly examined the room with his flashlight and wondered what the hell had happened – there was an inexplicable opening surrounding the well, but, besides that, the entire space was tightly enclosed by various, mostly broken pieces of stone, wood, glass, and other materials he didn’t have the mind to identify at the moment. It was almost as if the house had collapsed, and only the well had remained unaffected. </p><p>            “Fuck me,” he breathed out softly, though he felt he been quite thoroughly fucked already.</p><p>            The monster growled menacingly as it began making its way up the well. Eddie peered over the edge, sighted its snarling visage, then immediately leaned back and did what he did best – panic. He knew he’d been through worse than this (unfortunately), but he’d always been with friends then. People who were braver, more decisive, and stronger than him, who fought to the best of their ability while Eddie cowered in the corner. They were the reason Eddie had survived as long as he did, and he supposed his reliance on them would be the reason his second chance at life would end so abruptly.</p><p>            His head was pounding, his lungs burned painfully, and his heart seemed about ready to burst through his chest. All Eddie wanted to do was collapse on the floor and go back to sleep, and if the monster did make its way up and tear him to bits – well, perhaps it was the right thing to do. All Eddie knew was that, however he’d been brought back to life, it hadn’t been through the application of modern medicine. There was something sinister occurring, right in his own body, and he had no idea what to make of it. Was he truly living, the way he was now? Maybe it was best to not bother the living when he was supposed to be dead – and besides all of that, even if he did somehow beat the monster, he still had no way out of here. The debris had formed a certainly unnatural arch around the well, but besides that one spot, everywhere else it seemed three seconds away from collapsing once more.</p><p>            Then,  he thought of Bill, Mike, Ben, and Beverly. He thought of Richie, leaning over his body with glimmering eyes, shoving a coat against his wound in a desperate, vain attempt to stem the bleeding. At the very least, he needed to see them again – to know if they were okay, to see how they were doing, and then, and only then, Eddie might consider returning to the grave.</p><p>            He grabbed a large block of stone to his right, heaved it over the well opening, and dropped it. The monster screeched as the block slammed against its face, its arms and legs flailing in the air as it plummeted down the shaft and landed somewhere far below with a resounding thud.</p><p>            Eddie leaned over the edge of the well once more, but this time, there was no horrific ex-human scraping up the sides with bone-chilling screams. With that dealt with (at least for the time being), he turned his attention back to the debris around him.</p><p>            He reasoned that, in this kind of situation, any disturbance in the debris was likely to result in a fatal cave-in. There was something obviously strange about the well, however. It had warded away the debris with such force as to form a room of sorts around it, and something like that could only be attributed to Pennywise’s power.</p><p>            He trembled as he considered another very good reason to make it out of here: he needed to know if the others had dealt with Pennywise. Back then, as the darkness had encroached upon his blurring vision, he swore he had seen the clown shrinking and backing away. When he had unfathomably woken up again, he had naturally assumed they had dealt with It, but, now that he thought about it, there was quite a lot of evidence to the contrary.</p><p>            Exhibit A: the decaying monster Eddie just dropped a block on. Besides being exactly the sort of thing Pennywise liked terrorizing its victims with, Eddie was pretty sure it wasn’t plausible for such a creature to exist (in such a state) outside supernatural means.</p><p>            Exhibit B: the well. He assumed there was something special about it, being the only entrance to Pennywise’s lair, and so perhaps It had left some supernatural energy residue and caused this strange phenomenon. Conversely, the forcefield around the well could be attributed to the fact that Pennywise was still around and kicking, and probably loving the hopeless situation Eddie was in right now.</p><p>            Exhibit C: himself. He knew he’d been stabbed in the chest (a little below the chest, technically), and he knew people didn’t just recover from injuries like that by lying around and being unconscious. Besides that, there was something off about his body, a kind of eeriness that hung around it that frightened Eddie. It reminded him slightly of Pennywise.</p><p>            But even as he considered this, another thought rose to the forefront of his mind. It would be unfortunate, to say the least, if Pennywise was alive, but Eddie’s main concern right now was getting out. Perhaps he could exploit whatever strange power lay about the well to help.</p><p>            He took a deep breath, pushed himself up to stand atop the border of the well, and gently nudged a wooden plank that protruded out of the impromptu ceiling like a nail. The plank easily spun out of place, rotating in the air as bits of glass and plaster spread out, similarly suspended as if in zero-gravity. One end of the plank spun out of the boundaries of the well, and it immediately dropped to the floor.</p><p>            Eddie, with a little more confidence, extracted a piece of metal shaped like the head of a shovel from the depression left by the wooden plank. In the vertical confines of the well, it felt as weightless as air. He peered up at the domed ceiling, then down at the well once more. A plan began forming in his mind.</p><p>            He wasn’t sure what the hell was going on with this well, nor with himself. He knew only that whatever was happening, it would be his sole way of escaping from this otherwise hopeless situation.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Hey, so I promised arguments and kisses, and this chapter has neither! It's a good thing the end note from the first chapter keeps showing up in later chapters and I can't find a way to stop it from doing that! (But seriously, why does it keep showing up in other chapters?)</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0004"><h2>4. Moment of Ruination</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Things come to a head for Myra.</p>
          </blockquote><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>And so comes the last chapter in Myra's perspective! She won't feature too prominently from here on, and the story will shift to focus more exclusively on Richie and Eddie. That being said, Myra doesn't exactly get a happy ending here... at all, but I'd like to think she eventually moves on and adopts better habits. A fic for another day, perhaps (a fic about a generally disliked character who gets no more than a minute of screen time and whose sole purpose was to mirror Eddie's mom, because that's the kind of stuff I like to write apparently). </p><p>Note about Eddie's wound: from what I can remember, Eddie was impaled in an annoyingly vague region of his body, as in, right between his chest and his stomach. I've actually looked up anatomy charts trying to find what that region in the middle is called, and I've found nothing, so for the time being, I'm just saying it's in his chest.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>            It took them more time than Myra was strictly comfortable with to get Eddie out. They stood perched on shifting rubble and debris, stumbling with every piece they removed from the pile. And yet, strangely enough, no new fragments clattered down to fill in the depression they were slowly making in the ruins of the house. It was as if the area around Eddie was warded, but if that was so, it was by a force Myra neither understood nor was sure she wanted to understand.</p><p>             “Help me with this!” Richie cried out. Tears had begun welling up in his eyes, and there were already several wet trails across his cheeks where tears had streamed down, but he didn’t much seem to notice as he bent down and put his hands under a large stone chunk. Myra unsteadily stepped deeper into the growing hole they were making and placed her hands underneath the other side. Simultaneously, they let out choked grunts of exertion as they tossed the slab over the edge of the hole. It clunked noisily against something metallic.</p><p>            Myra looked back to resume digging, but the sight that greeted her was enough to make her stumble back and let out an aborted gasp. It was Eddie – her Eddie – or his head, at the least. His right arm lay uncomfortably propped up against a sheet of wood, and he began coughing uncontrollably.</p><p>            Myra went still with panic at her husband’s involuntary wheezes – her hands unconsciously thrust into both pockets in search of an inhaler, but of course, she hadn’t brought one in her rush to get here. She sunk uselessly to her knees.</p><p>            “Eddie-bear,” she choked out. “Don’t you worry, we’re going to get you out of there.” Eddie’s head, just barely free enough to allow for some movement, whipped to face her. His expression of utter shock, as if Myra were a flying pig and not his goddamned wife, sent heat coursing through her veins, but it quickly subsided. Now wasn’t the time to yell at him – that would come later, after he had been treated by a proper hospital and was safe and fine and not buried in a house’s worth of rubble.</p><p>            “Myra?” he squeaked out. “W-what are you doing here? Ho-“</p><p>            “Eddie,” Richie interrupted. His mouth had stretched into a wide grin seemingly of its own accord, as his eyes remained filled with a panicked worry that, as much as Myra loathed to admit it, matched her own. He crouched down and took Eddie’s exposed hand in his.</p><p>            Myra knew exactly what she wanted to happen – she wanted Eddie to pull his hand away in disgust, look at Richie as if he’d grown three heads and lost as many brains, and then turn to Myra and ask for help. She wanted him to, at the least, look dismayed by Richie’s touch, so she could step up and take his hand instead and look down and see the grin on his face and feel, for the first time in days, like everything was going to be alright.</p><p>            Instead, Eddie seemed frighteningly reassured as Richie took his hand. His face relaxed into something utterly incomprehensible, something like happiness (but it couldn’t possibly be, because they hadn’t seen each other in decades and Myra was his wife). Myra wondered when she’d last seen such an expression on Eddie’s face. She wondered if she ever had, if she had ever perceived genuine joy from him, or if he had merely feigned enjoyment every time they had been together.</p><p>            She didn’t understand it one bit. What was the point of it all? What had Myra spent so much time worrying and pulling her hair out about when her husband was here, inexplicably stuck in the ruins of some old house in the middle of nowhere and staring up at Richie Tozier like he was the best thing to happen since sliced bread? Didn’t Myra deserve that as well?</p><p>            Where had Richie been when Eddie got food poisoning and spent three hours at the toilet puking his guts out? Certainly, he hadn’t been at Eddie’s side, attentively holding a warm cloth and antacids and valiantly ignoring the putrid stink coming from the toilet bowl as Myra had.</p><p>            Where had Richie been when Eddie burnt his finger on the stove? Certainly, he hadn’t been pulling out the first aid kit like Myra and treating his wound with a practiced efficiency (and, of course, later on, they went to hospital to get it checked out despite Eddie’s protests that he was fine and that it was but a slight burn).</p><p>            And where had Richie been when Eddie got mugged one late night and came home with a black eye? Probably, he’d been blackout drunk somewhere (Myra had no real reason to think that Richie was a drunk, only her impression that he seemed the type) while Myra had sat with Eddie, pressed an icepack to his face, and did her very best to soothe his worries about stolen credit cards and identity fraud.</p><p>            And it finally, finally occurred to Myra, in its entirety: a revelation she had been having in pieces, now shoved in her face like a glaring neon sign-</p><p>            None of it mattered. It didn’t matter that Myra had, to the best of her ability, fulfilled her role as girlfriend and later wife to Eddie Kaspbrak. It didn’t matter that she had moderated his excesses, compensated for his flaws, and strived for his improvement as a responsible and mature adult. It didn’t matter that she sometimes felt like tearing her hair out in anxiety about his safety and health, or that she had decided, sometime before his proposal, to dedicate her life to helping him live the best and safest life he could. What mattered was very obvious to her now, because she was watching it in painful clarity. It was a shared touch that communicated things words couldn’t, a look that exchanged emotions such that Myra couldn’t comprehend, an easy if slightly aggressive banter that belied their mutual understanding as friends, and as something more. It was everything Myra had sought so ardently for before she lost sight of her vision, and it was, she realized, everything she didn’t have with Eddie. She could state the card number, expiration date, and CVV of every one of Eddie’s credit cards from memory. She knew his social security number by heart, and, if asked, she could recite all 13 of his alleged allergies within 30 seconds. And yet, for all the data she had compiled on her husband of 6 years, she had never felt more like she’d never known him at all. This man in front of him, laughing easily as Richie lifted him out of the debris with both arms, was a complete stranger to her. She had wasted so much of her life fretting over a mirage, deluding herself into believing Eddie was her soulmate when, in all honesty, she likely knew, somewhere deep within her, that there was an essential dysfunctionality about their relationship and their marriage. It was all wrong. It was nothing like Myra had aspired for it to be – and Myra, too, was nothing like she had aspired to be.</p><p>            Nevertheless, she still had to make one last attempt, regardless of how certain she was now of its failure. She watched Richie and Eddie embrace each other like something more than old friends, their sobs and laughs intermixing into some confused amalgamation of raw emotion. Then, when they finally parted, she stepped forward with outstretched arms and hugged Eddie. She’d done it many times before, but, pathetically, she must have never realized – his arms, held stiffly to his sides, his eyes darting every which way, his lips held tightly against each other – it wasn’t all nervousness. Eddie was uncomfortable, and not just with the idea of physical contact – he was uncomfortable with Myra specifically. He was trying to fold into himself like a handkerchief because Myra, of all people, dared to touch him. Myra forced herself back, but despite her best efforts, she only felt sorrow and pain. She felt broken, vulnerable and humiliated, as she stumbled back and let the tears flow down her cheeks. It was somehow worse than thinking Eddie had died. She might have learned to deal with the uncertainty, with never knowing how Eddie truly felt about her or what he’d been doing in the first place in his childhood home. This rejection, as blatant as anything could be, was simply excruciating, perhaps worse than anything Myra had ever experienced before. Some part of her almost wished he’d had the sense of stay dead (Myra quickly suppressed that part of her before it could so much as get another word in).</p><p>            “E-Eddie-be-“ she stopped herself before she could finish the endearment. She felt sick to her stomach simply thinking it now.</p><p>            “Eddie,” she began again, her voice shaking uncontrollably, “I’m so glad you’re okay.” And even though it wasn’t a lie, she still felt like a fraud saying it – because she was still trying to sound like his wife. She was still his wife, technically, but now neither of them had any illusions about their relationship. Somewhere in the mess that was this entire situation, their marriage had been laid bare for both of them to see: a desolate, dry thing that had died out long before either of them had had the guts to acknowledge it. Myra almost felt like laughing from the irony of it. After years of strained marriage, based on delusion on Myra’s part and faked affection on Eddie’s, they had finally, finally reached a genuinely mutual understanding.</p><p>            And it was that Myra no longer had a place in Eddie’s life. That she had never really had a place in it in the first place. That the best thing she could do for both of them was go away and never come back, and pray desperately there was still enough in her to heal.</p><p>            At the very least, she thought angrily, I have the right to get in a few shots first.</p><p>            She opened her mouth, an impressively acrimonious tirade on the tip of her tongue, when her eyes wandered down to his chest instinctively to check for injuries. These impromptu examinations almost never yielded anything, but this time, Myra didn’t need her acute eyesight or nurse’s training to recognize that the gaping hole in Eddie’s chest was bad.</p><p>            “What the hell is that?” she screeched. She pointed one finger at Eddie’s wound and barely managed to keep herself standing.</p><p>            Richie turned, his joyful expression soured by bemusement and worry now, and looked at where Myra was pointing.</p><p>            He let out a tiny whimper. “Eds, um, you have- you have a fucking hole in your chest. You have a fucking hole in your chest. Holy shit.” Eddie looked incredibly uncomfortable; his hands curled into fists by his sides. He pointedly looked anywhere but at his injury.</p><p>            Myra stood completely still, her body seized by a fear and panic like nothing she’d ever felt before. She had no idea what was happening. People didn’t survive with wounds like that. More than that, people definitely didn’t talk and look happy and move around with wounds like that.</p><p>            “Of course I have a hole in my chest,” Eddie snapped tightly. He still refused to look down, and his expression had quickly inundated with anxiety. “It’s not like it just closed on its own.”</p><p>            “Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, oh my god,” Myra muttered on repeat. She finally fell to her knees, took her head in both hands, and gripped it tightly enough to hurt. It was marginally better than looking at the hole in her husband’s chest. She was beginning to realize that this – whatever this was – was about so much more than their emotional baggage and dysfunctional relationship. There was too much Myra simply didn’t understand about Eddie, parts of him that he never shared and that Myra probably wouldn’t have received very well.</p><p>            Perhaps it was then that Myra really gave up on their marriage – regardless of any of the other issues they might have had, the fact of the matter was, Eddie had a hole in his chest, and Myra, for all her love and dedication and worry for him, really didn’t want to know how or why.</p><p>            “Eddie, we need to get you to a hospital,” Richie said shakily. His hands trembled by his sides, and he was staring at Eddie as if unsure what to think.</p><p>            “No,” Eddie snapped angrily. “No hospital. This isn’t something a fucking doctor’s going to fix.”</p><p>            “Wh- what the hell do you mean, ‘no hospital’!?” Richie spluttered out, and some of the confusion in his expression and tone had definitely been replaced with irritation. “I get you don’t want to look at it, but you still have a hole in your chest!”</p><p>            “No, really, Dr. Tozier,” Eddie retorted, “I didn’t realize from the last twenty times you told me.”</p><p>            Richie’s face twisted into a pure display of incredulity, like he couldn’t believe Eddie was fighting him on this. Myra was sure she would have had a similar expression on her face if not for the fact that she was still vainly trying to stop hyperventilating.</p><p>            “Eddie, don’t be an idiot,” Richie said. “You just came back to life! Are you trying to die again?” He gestured furiously at the rubble from which he had pulled Eddie.</p><p>            “What is happening?” Myra sobbed out miserably. It was all too much to process – she had just realized her marriage was a sham, her husband didn’t love him, and she was once again alone in this world, and now said husband was standing with a hole in his chest like it were the most natural thing to do. Somewhere deep within her, Myra had probably known there was something different about Eddie – there was a kind of strange air about him, as if he’d been touched by something that shouldn’t reside in this world and had never fully recovered from the experience. At the time, Myra had easily dismissed it as her imagination (the ironic thing being, of course, that it was perhaps the only part of Eddie Myra hadn’t thought up on some level), but she was beginning to wonder if maybe it was all true. If Eddie really had had some encounter with the supernatural, and it had left him so terrified of the world he had run back to his mother, then to Myra when his mother passed, to give him that feeling of security he felt he needed.</p><p>            It was obvious enough now that he didn’t need that security anymore. He didn’t need Myra, and he likely never did, and here was the proof right in front of her. For all Myra had done to protect him, he had still ended up apparently dying, if Richie was to be believed, and then coming back to life with nothing out of the ordinary besides the very prominent hole in his chest.</p><p>            And as unnerved as he seemed by his own situation, he made no move to approach Myra. Rather, he seemed content to simply stand by Richie and argue with him, and that didn’t make sense either, because they seemed so goddamned happy to just be talking to each other even in the form of angry remarks and half-meant barbs.</p><p>            Myra had offered everything she had, everything she knew, and Eddie had rejected her. She had nothing left, and he had no reason to love her.</p><p>            But as she stood there and watched the two of them bicker about sanitation in hospitals and chest wounds, she thought that even if she was a loveless being, a woman meant to never genuinely love or be loved, she could at least recognize it in its true form-</p><p>            Because it was standing there for her to behold in all its envied glory.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Predictions for the next chapter (which may or may not turn out to be true, I've learned it's best not to promise things when it comes to my stories): Eddie's revival will be revealed to the other Losers. Eddie and Richie might finally kiss (and it only took over 10,000 words as well!). The situation with Eddie's body and resurrection will be explored further. Drama will ensue. Passions will flare. Words will be said.</p>
        </blockquote><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Coming up: revelations! Arguments! Kisses (maybe)!</p></blockquote></div></div>
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